They Say Its Your Birthday

On Saturday night my family celebrated my sister and brother's birthdays, which are only 3 days apart. I've written before about how family events are great low pressure situations to practice getting good event-type photos. In the above photo I was concerned with capturing this moment and I didn't realize my focus point was off(it may not be too noticeable at this size but becomes apparent when viewed larger). Good thing this wasn't a decisive moment at someones's wedding....

Blue Hen Bust

I went out for a hike at the Blue Hen Falls trail in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park the other day. There are two pretty cool water falls there, Blue Hen and Buttermilk, and I thought that they might make for good photos all frozen up. I was wrong. Blue Hen Fall's ice formations just weren't that picturesque and Buttermilk Falls just looked like a hill covered in snow. The photo is just above Buttermilk Falls - the foreground(and where I'm standing is actually the river) - it was really the only photo I was happy with from the hike. I think I'll have to head back out there when the falls are starting to melt....

Recording Part II

...and now the exciting conclusion to yesterday's post....

The photo to the left shows the lighting set-up I used for the above photo. The top photo is my friend Justin about to lay down an acoustic guitar track - I added a black & white gradient layered at 90% to get the color on the photo. I'll be posting even more of these photos to my flickr page today.

Shallow Depth

Today I was at a recording studio at Tri-C in Cleveland to shoot some photos for a friend who is working on a music project there. He needed some photos of the process to go along with it. The studios up there are absolutely beautiful.

Anyways - when I got home and started to look through my photos this one immediately jumped out at me. It turned out pretty much exactly as I hoped and I edited up a copy before I even finished looking through the rest of what I shot. I achieved the narrow depth-of-field by shooting with and aperture of f/1.8. It was lit with my flash & shoot through-umbrella up and to the left. I will probably have a part 2 to this post with more studio photos tomorrow - but I was too excited to finish more editing and posted this for now....

Flowers Pt. II

Laura hung some of the roses I got her on her door for drying. I really liked they way the looked on the door. I only had my camera and one flash with me so I bounced the flash off the ceiling for the light. This was shot with my 50mm lens.

Flowers are a Girl's Best Friend

There is a certain kind of person that really likes getting flowers - I tend to call them "women". Laura and I have been together for a year so I decided some flowers were in order. She was real happy about that - as you can see from her dancing.

Canal Fulton

On Saturday Laura and I were heading down to Portage Lakes to see our friends Kyle and Greg participate in the annual Polar Bear Jump(see Kyle's Chief Source Post). I was planning on getting some good photos for the blogs. Well, things don't always go as planned. We couldn't find it. We drove around the Portage Lakes area until we realized we were going to miss the jump so we just randomly kept driving. We ended up in Canal Fulton. We decided to park, get some lunch, and explore the little town. Even though it wasn't how we planned to spend our afternoon it turned out to be a worthwhile trip - and I always have my pictures.

A Serious Man

This time of year I work part time as an assistant for a photographer. Yesterday we were up in Cleveland shooting some executives in a corporate headquarters. I was more dressed up then I usually am so when I got home I decided to take a portrait of myself. A "serious" portrait if you will. This pose beat out the one with my cat on my lap....

I really liked the way the shadows from the window were on the wall. I lighted the photo with a reflective umbrella and flash high to the left and a shoot-through umbrella and flash low to the right(to add a bit of fill).

My House in 3D

I found a new website called Start 3D where you upload 2 photos taken three inches apart and they turn them 3D for you. I took these photos of my house to try it out. It doesn't seem to be perfected yet but the site says that it is still in BETA. It looks like they plan to start charging to use the site at some point which I don't really understand - I mean its kind of a cool thing to try out but I don't see some huge purpose for this....

RIP Fairlawn Lanes

The old Fairlawn Lanes building in my neighborhood has been a background and/or subject for many of my photos. The most recent time I had used it was as a location for a shoot with my friend Gabe(view ChiefSource.com post here). After reading a Beacon article about the building being torn down I went there last night and today to get some farewell shots. Above is what it looked like this morning - below is what it looked like last winter.

Below/left is from late last night and below/right is from this morning.

Gum Ball Flickr

When the farm I work on closed for the season I was given a bag of Dubble Bubble Gum Balls that would go stale by the next season. The other day I grabbed two of them to chew on and realized how much they resembled the Flickr logo. Being a huge Flickr fan I decided to take a photo and make my "Flickr Gum Ball Logo".

Flickr is a great site for photographers - for 20 bucks a year you can upload an unlimited amount of photos(it also can be used for free but with upload limits and advertising). Its also a great place to receive advice and learn from fellow photographers. Flickr group's discussions and pools make for the best photo forums on the web.

Cavaliers Fake Tilt-Shift

Earlier this year I went to Quicken Loans Arena to see the Cavaliers play the Chicago Bulls. I just realized that some of the photos I had taken might work well for a tilt-shift fake miniature, a Photoshop technique that mimics the effect of tilt shift lenses to make things appear miniature or model-like. I did a post last winter on this technique for the Chief Source which you can see here.
This effect is best viewed large.

Waterloo Restaurant

This is Laura at the Waterloo Restaurant in South Akron. Ever since Laura and I have been dating(about a year) I always take a photo of her when we are eating out. I don't really know why - maybe I could start a Zipper City Restaurant page to go with my camera page?! Anyways - this is the latest and I plan to keep it up, maybe I'll make something with them in the future...

Double Your Fun!

This was done using masking layers in Photoshop. I took the two images with my camera on a tripod than combined them to create one. I can't take complete credit for the concept as I've seen other people do similar photographs. I did however try to bring something new to it.

Bombs Away!

My friend Wes invented a new drink called the 'OC Bomb' and our friend Ryan was crazy enough to try it. It is basically an 'Irish Car Bomb' on steroids - a shot of Baily's dropped into a shot of Jameson dropped into a 22oz. glass of Guinness and than chugged! I got my camera out because I didn't believe someone could handle this monster - Ryan proved me wrong and easily put it away. Mind you this was around 6PM not sometime late at night. Ridiculous.

Cemetery Snow

Today I found myself in the unfortunate position to be standing in a cemetery in the cold and snow. I felt this photo captured the moment. I hope you've had enough depressing posts for a while, I have - and its time to move on. Keep reading - things are looking up....

Snowed In?

For some reason my girlfriend's boss thought it was funny to plow her car in after the blizzard the other night. She found it humorous as well - I didn't. Above is her in the process of clearing it off - I also helped out with a shovel.

As you can see below we eventually did get it out.

Square Records Party

Last night at Square Records 'New Body Type' had a CD Release Party for their record 'Pink Boys' and Ted Mallison released his comic book collection 'Modern Funnies'. New Body Type played the record live. A fun time was had by all....and I was there to capture it on a digital sensor.

Ruth Eva Sobel

1917 - 2010

What an era to live through - there must have been more change during that period than any other time in human history. This is my grandma at my sister's wedding last spring.

As my niece said, "at least Great Grandma won't need her walker anymore and she can do flips!"

The Waiting

It was another long day at City Hospital. Being the photo geek I am I have an urge to try and capture every moment and some of its emotion. There is no other way to put it - I feel like we are sitting around waiting for my Grandma to die. I don't just feel that way - this is in fact what we are doing. They moved her to palliative care today, which means treating the pain - no longer attempting to cure, (seems to me the same thing as hospice).

"more frailer than the flowers these precious hours that keep us so tightly bound.
you come to my eyes like a vision from the skies and i'll be with you when the deal goes down." - dylan

The Four Best Dudes I Know

Yes - the glass table two days in a row. This time I decided to get a few more dudes to join the photo session.

This was obviously a Photoshop job - its not perfect but I think its pretty good. It takes a pretty steady hand and some serious patients to put these together. I usually don't have those in too great a supply but I was really feeling it today.

I've been planning to do something like this for a while but I was inspired to do it today by the photography of Natalie Dybisz.

Check her stuff out - its pretty sweet.

Through the Table

I always thought it would be kind of cool to do a band promo shot up through my glass dinning room table. Today I decided to mess around taking some shots of myself through it. I framed myself with some of the iron work but if I get a few more people around this table I think it would be cool to put the camera on the ground pointing directly up. Hopefully I'll try this soon.